1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a video record apparatus such as a hard disk recorder and in particular to chapter division in dubbing a video photographed with a photographing apparatus such as a digital video camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some video record apparatus such as a hard disk recorder (HDD recorder) can dub (record) a video photographed with a digital video camera (DV camera). To dub a video, the HDD recorder and the DV camera are connected by a cable and then a play key of the DV camera is operated. Then, the video photographed with the DV camera and recorded on tape is played back. In this state, if a record key of the HDD recorder (or an attached remote control) is operated, the played-back video output from the DV camera is recorded on a hard disk included in the HDD recorder. To stop dubbing the video, a stop key of the HDD recorder or the DV camera is operated.
Thus, after the DV camera is connected to the HDD recorder, the playback operation is performed in the DV camera and the record operation is performed in the HDD recorder, whereby dubbing from the DV camera to the HDD recorder can be performed. In this case, all of the record contents of the tape are dubbed intact to the hard disk by one record operation. However, only one file is created on the hard disk and if the record contents are made up of a plurality of parts, inconvenience occurs in finding the beginning at the edit or playback time. Then, to easily find the beginning, the file needs to be divided into chapters. Such chapter division arts are described in the following patent documents, for example:
The art described in JP-A-2002-152636 is as follows: A record-playback apparatus including an automatic chapter creation function allows the user to perform predetermined button operation for an already recorded video while seeing a played-back video, thereby setting a chapter and perform temporary stop operation for the video being recorded while seeing the recorded video, thereby setting a chapter. In the apparatus, however, the user needs to perform operation for setting a chapter after the video is captured or in the process of capturing the video and therefore the user cannot avoid being bothered with the inconvenience in dubbing.
JP-A-9-214879 describes a method of dividing a moving image into scene units. However, since a moving image is divided into scene units based on detection of a discontinuous point in the moving picture and thus is forcibly divided at the discontinuous point and a chapter cannot be set at the point desired by the user.
In JP-A-11-69281, reference frame data is extracted from compressed data and change in video is detected based on the reference frame data, whereby a representative image is extracted. However, in this case, scenes are also forcibly divided as in the art described in JP-A-9-214879 and thus a chapter cannot be set at the point desired by the user.